The B2B Marketing Blog
As the end of 2023 rapidly approaches, here’s a quick look back at the posts, old and new, that grabbed the most attention this year.
Image credit: Magda Ehlers on Pexels
It’s an interesting mix, covering metrics and analytics; martech tools; AI (of course—wasn’t this pretty much the year of ChatGPT?); and a couple of oddball guest posts that generated a surprising degree of interest.
With no further ado, here’s the list.
Guest post by Austin Cline.
The past two decades have brought disruptive technological change and radically reshaped B2B marketing practices.
Traditional B2B marketing strategies relied heavily on direct and outbound methods. Cold calls, trade shows, direct mail, and print ads were the primary forms of marketing. Getting your message in front of the right prospects was often difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.
The spread of social media and blogging, radically faster Internet speeds, online video, the rise of influencers, and reliance on mobile devices continues to change the way companies market their products and services.
The expanded range of marketing platforms and pace of change require B2B companies to continually re-examine their strategies.
While cold calling and print media remain useful, and live event marketing remains effective at every stage of the sales funnel, digital channels have surpassed traditional methods in terms of importance, reach, and budget allocation.
Here are 10 B2B digital marketing strategies to help maintain a competitive edge.
[Read more…]
Social media monitoring tools are increasing essential for companies of all sizes as the explosion of social media content renders manual monitoring efforts hopeless. But how do you choose one? With almost 200 social monitoring tools (and new entrants still coming to market), available at a range of price levels from free to if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it, how does an organization select the right social monitoring tool for its needs?
Whether you’ve a selection team working on this or the entire project has been delegated to you, here are nine critical considerations to keep in mind as you review and evaluate your options.
Range of coverage. Virtually every social media monitoring tool worthy of the label covers the big social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit) and content sharing sites (YouTube, Flickr). Many include at least the most popular blogs as well. The best also monitor message boards and forums, easy to overlook but critical particularly for niche b2b products and services. For example, a discussion of the latest developments in aerospace composites is probably more likely to happen on a niche engineering forum than on Facebook.
Frequency of alerts. News can travel extremely fast through social media. Even if it’s “only” a customer complaint, you don’t want it sitting out there unanswered for long. It’s imperative that your social media monitoring tool provides realtime or near realtime monitoring and alerting, so you can respond to critical items promptly. Certainly, not every comment requires an immediate reply, but when a customer or prospect has a question or issue, response time matters. And in social media, the whole world can see how fast (or not) your response time is.
Workflow capabilities. A blogger raises a question about your company’s financial outlook. A user is frustrated by a perceived malfunction in your product. A customer shares an idea for an enhancement. A highly favorable product review is published in an online journal. You may discover any of these events through social media monitoring, but in each case not is the response different but the respondent is too. The financial question needs to be directed to your CEO or CFO; the user issue to customer support; the enhancement idea to product management; and the product review to marketing. If there is any significant volume of social media commentary about your product, service or company, look for a social media monitoring tool that provides workflow tools that make it quick and easy to notify and direct the right person to take action on each new mention.
Value. Price is always a consideration of course, but in selecting a potentially critical business tool like social media monitoring (consider the cost of BP’s social media failure), the more important consideration is “value,” as in: does the tool do at least as good a job at meeting the specific social media needs of my company as competing tools, and is it priced similarly or lower than tools offering equivalent functionality? “Free” is always a popular price point, but in the world of social media tools (as in many other areas of life), you get what you pay for. There are several free social media monitoring tools that provide limited functionality but can serve as a starting point for small businesses; however, larger and more socially active organizations will quickly recognize a need for more sophisticated fee-based offerings.
Support and training. Even with advanced UI design, more sophisticated tools are fundamentally more challenging to use. Be sure to get clarity on what kind of training is offered upfront, how much personalized assistance is offered as part of the package, how to get questions answered and how robust the internal help system is for ongoing use.
Metrics and reporting. What kind of reporting capabilities does the tool provide? Your specific needs will of course vary based on company size, level of social media activity and your organization’s specific goals and objectives, but two critical roles of reporting for any organization are: 1) the ability to demonstrate progress/change over time (e.g. more website traffic driven by social media) and 2) actionable analytics (measures that enable you to determine whether you should do more a specific activity, do less, or do it differently).
Geographic/language coverage. Enterprises that do business globally need the ability to track social media mentions across borders and in multiple languages. Global monitoring capability adds cost and complexity to a tool, so don’t buy it if you don’t need it, but for multinational businesses, this is essential functionality.
Integration with other applications. Again, small companies with fairly simple programs don’t need to be too concerned with this, but companies with larger, more complex social media programs should investigate how their social media tools under consideration integrate with applications such as CRM systems (e.g. Salesforce.com), marketing automation tools and web analytics packages.
Monitoring beyond social media. Finally, organizations that actively target both traditional and social media may want to look at tools like Vocus, Cision and/or Sysomos which integrate PR and social media monitoring functions into a single platform. Social media isn’t an island and marketing / outreach efforts there should ideally be integrated with other programs, so in these environments, monitoring capabilities beyond social media become valuable.
Keeping these nine criteria in mind (or least those that pertain to the size and complexity of social media efforts in your organization) will help you make the right choice from among the broad array of social media monitoring tools on the market.
Despite being a quick, almost breezy read (how often do you read that said about a book on SEO?), The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
What’s most notable about this book, however, is that it’s an SEO book written for a broad audience. Unlike typical “how to do SEO” tomes, this book is more about what SEO is and how it works, in plain business language. Though it certainly contains instructive content, it can be read by and provide value to everyone on a web development team: designers, copy writers and developers, along with the entire marketing team, as well as line of business managers who aren’t directly responsible for site optimization but can benefit from understanding how it works and why it’s important. Rebecca deftly weaves together all of the important elements of SEO, from keyword research and link building to the role of social media, without excessive insider jargon or getting into the weeds on topics like file naming conventions, PHP vs. Javascript, or canonicalization.
Why is it important for executives not directly involved in search to understand more about it? As Rebecca explains in the book’s foreword and introduction:
“SEO…is the foundation, the bedrock of online marketing. It isn’t just the foundation of search marketing; I submit to you that it is the foundation of all marketing. This is exactly because we live in a world where increasingly, Google dominates the search landscape and Google has taught people to love search…In the 12 years or so since search engine marketing has been in existence, we have learned this one truth: Al media, all marketing, and all communications have one thing in common—they all drive people to search. And in a recent study conducted by Jupiter Research, of all the people who were stimulated by an offline cause to go online and search, some 40 percent of them actually made a purchase…A well-optimized website, therefore, is something akin to the Holy Grail of marketing. It provides the right message to the right person at the right time…Search long ago became the second-largest online activity (after email). Search has evolved from merely providing answers to stated problems and queries. Today, it’s the way most people navigate the Web.”
In her chapter on “learning to do the Google Dance,” Rebecca notes the similarity between SEO and public relations: both can help you influence the information that prospects find about your company and its products or services, but not control that information. Maybe your news (or your website) will make the front page, or maybe it will be buried several pages in. As she notes, “If you want to guarantee that your message will appear (exactly)…the way you want it to and where you want it to be, buy an ad.” In other words, SEO, like PR, can be important in terms of influence, but it’s unreasonable to expect complete precision.
(Interestingly, on the topic of PR and SEO, Rebecca writes that “Although many PR professionals still don’t know about or understand the concept of SEO PR, a handful of SEO-savvy boutique PR agencies have sprung up recently. These PR agencies specialize in optimizing and releasing news for their clients with the goal of increasing search engine visibility.” Actually, KC Associates, the agency I work with, has been doing this for years, and though we focus on b2b technology clients, I’m not sure we qualify as “boutique.” And having been around since 1988, we certainly haven’t “sprung up recently!”)
To put the challenge of SEO into perspective for marketers, PR professionals and line of business managers who may not appreciate its difficulties, the author notes that “with hundreds of billions of sites out there—and more every day—no matter how obscure or arcane your website is, chances are you have more than a healthy amount of competition. Heck, more than 2 million page in Google’s index are about beekeeping.”
Though the book doesn’t specifically address web presence optimization, it does touch on elements important to SEO beyond meta tags and directory links. For example, email can play an important role (through maintaining an online archive of search-friendly archived newsletter content), as can personal and corporate reputation management, online advertising (ads are links!) and social media activities.
There is a wealth of wisdom packed into this compact book: search is something to consider from the very start of a website project, not as an afterthought. Companies can no longer afford to build static “brochureware” websites—to be successful in search, sites must “now be ever-growing, changing, and evolving platforms for publishing content, news, and information about products and services.” Search is no longer simply even about website content, but has fragmented into local search, video search, blog search, image search and news search among other categories. Search is an ongoing activity, not a one-time event: results aren’t achieved overnight, and developing quality links in particular is a process that happens over time. Although, as noted, the book isn’t overly technical, the importance of technology isn’t ignored: the author touches on the importance of being careful with drop-down menus, using CSS in place of tables where possible, maintaining a relatively flat file structure and utilizing breadcrumb navigation to help both search engines and human users better understand your site’s layout.
From a pure how-to standpoint, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets
Still, these are minor quibbles. Overall, The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
NOTE: Still with me? Thanks! Here’s a reward: the publisher sent me an extra copy of this excellent book, so I will give it away to first person who tweets this review. Your tweet MUST include @TomPick, ad I’ll be the sole judge of the winner based on what shows up in my Twitter #replies feed. I’ll even pay the postage to send it you.